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Home » Forums » AskWoody support » Productivity software by function » MS Outlook and email programs » Lock down Outlook to only send plain text messages
Which version of Outlook are you running?
I don’t know whether there is a group policy for the format of messages you originate. That would be handy. However, replies and forwards typically carry forward the format in which they were received. You can change the format of a reply or forward using the Format menu (in the Outlook editor; not sure when using Word as the mail editor).
For automating the format switching process with VBA code, I noticed that it is much easier to switch the format of a reply or forward message to Plain Text in Outlook 2003 than it was in Outlook 2002. I can’t recall for 2002; I might never have checked during the time I was using it. In theory you could enforce the use of plain text in an add-in that switched the format when the user clicked the Send button. Add-ins can be disabled, though…
You could try this, in ThisOutlookSession:
Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean) ' This should run only for mail items... If Item.Class olMail Then Exit Sub If Item.BodyFormat olFormatPlain Then If MsgBox("Format will be automatically converted to plain text. Proceed?", _ vbInformation + vbOKCancel) = vbOK Then 'For HTML messages, embedded images become invisible attachments, neither ' stripped nor attached "normally" Item.BodyFormat = olFormatPlain Else 'Return to composition window Cancel = True End If End If End Sub
You may want to look at Office 2003 Resource Kit Downloads for the Office Resource kit and the Office 2003 Policy template files (this contains a spread sheet about which policies can be set.). It appears that you may be able to do what you want with policies.
Joe
--Joe
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